Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  “Well, you are right enough, that was her name.”

  “She had a figurehead on her of a big-breasted woman with flowing hair. That is right, is it not, just to be sure?”’

  “Why, yes.” Into his mind there came the memory of that distant afternoon in Oates’s workshop by the Mersey, the staring figures, the smells of pitch and varnish, the irascible carver limping among his creations, his father’s enthusiasm for the huge, garish duchess looming above them with her yellow hair and blue dress, her look of a captive giant.

  He had shared that day, in that sorcerer’s den, something of the feeling for the ship that had possessed his father. He had his love for Sarah then, to open his heart to wonder … “What do you mean,” he said on a note of anger, Histo come here and talk to me of a ship that was lost twelve years ago with all aboard her?”’

  “She was not lost.”

  Erasmus raised a hand quickly to his temple, a habit since childhood when he was distracted or confused. “Not lost?”’ It came to him now that his visitor might be dangerous. There was a heavy glass paperweight on the desk before him, the only thing that could serve as a weapon in this room. He moved his right arm a little nearer to it.

  But there was nothing of madness in the tanned, bluff-featured face of the man opposite him.

  If the captain had noticed the movement he gave no sign of it. “I saw her less than six months since,” he said. ‘What is left of her.

  I am here fitting out a ship and took occasion to find you out and tell you of it. She is beached up on the south-east coast of Florida.”

  Erasmus stared at him. “Beached? You mean wrecked on the shore?”’

  “No, I mean hauled up deliberate. She was a good way from the shore.” Some of the diffidence or uncertainty had returned to the captain’s voice: it was as if he too had been visited by disbelief.

  “Further than a man would ever expect to see a ship,” he said, in a lower tone.

  “Florida?”’ Erasmus raised a hand to his face again. “What should the ship be doing there, so far to westward? She never reached Jamaica. What rigmarole is this?”’

  “I am speaking of what I have seen with these eyes.” There was an angry brusqueness in the captain’s voice now. “I thought it my duty to come,” he said. ‘I will not take any more of your time, sir.”

  “No, no.” Erasmus raised his hand.

  “Pardon me,” he said. “I intended no offence. I must hear the rest of what you have to say.

  Your words came as a shock to me… My father died in that same year the ship failed to return, and the circumstances of my life were altogether changed.”

  “I know it.” Philips was gruff still, but mollified. “I was sorry to hear of it.”

  Erasmus smiled at him. “Will you not sit?”’ he said. “I have some good Madeira here in my cabinet. Or if that is not to your taste, my man can fetch you something else.”

  “What you keep close at hand is good enough for me,” the captain said, returning the smile.

  Pouring out the wine, Erasmus found his hands slightly unsteady. “Now, sir,” he said.

  “You have my full attention.”

  Thus encouraged, and more at ease now, coat unbuttoned and glass in hand, the captain began his story. He had been in the Africa trade, it seemed, but not for slaves, except incidentally. His main trade now was in timber and hides between the North American colonists and the Spanish islands of the Caribbean. He had been following his usual route northward through the Florida Straits, bound for Norfolk, Virginia. They had anchored at a latitude of some twenty-seven degrees, south of a point on the coast known as the Boca Nueva, where there were fresh springs. He had sent a party ashore for water and firewood, and to shoot whatever game they came upon.

  “No man is perfect, sir,” the captain said, shaking his head, “and seamen less so perhaps than others, being confined together for long periods. They contrived to draw offsome rum from the ship’s stores and carry it to shore with them. It was not enough to take their legs away, but it was enough to make them wild and heedless. They sighted a party of Indians and gave chase, hoping to catch the women among them. At least, that is how I understood the matter—they tried to pretend otherwise later, to lighten their punishment. There are Indian bands along that coast, sir, so much is true. They are hostile to white men and their arrows can give a death-wound if they strike in the right place. What these men did was folly, to rate it no worse. They were led on further than they intended, especially the two foremost, and found themselves in a swampy wooded ground where the only way forward was by following the course of a dry creek bed. This took them round in a blind curve and so they came upon her quite sudden, they said, tilted over in the bed of the creek, one side of her jammed against the bank, with creepers trailing over her and her decks half rotted away and both her masts down. That is how they told it to the mate and that is how the mate told it to me.” The captain shook his head again. “Out of sight of the shore, she was,” he said, “in the middle of swamps and trees, sir, where no ship has any business to be. She was an uncanny sight even for me, who was prepared for it by their account. Her name was there, on the scroll below the quarter figure. Faded, but you could still make it out.”

  He had gone himself, led by the men who had found her.

  He had clambered over the sloping, gaping planks of her deck and found his way below, to the captain’s cabin. “Nothing much there but rubbish,” he said.

  “She had been well picked over. By those who left her there, I suppose, and by the rats that were aboard with them and maybe the Indians after. But I found this behind a rotted bulkhead.” He put a hand into the pocket of his coat and drew out a square-shaped book bound in black buckram, shredded and ragged now. “Twas in a wood box,” he said. ‘The damp has done for most of it, but some pages can still be read. It is the ship’s log.”

  Erasmus reached out his hand for it with the sense of slow, protracted motion sometimes felt in dreams. His thoughts too had slowed; there was nothing in his mind but the strangeness of what the captain had told him. “But is it sure?”’ he said, with some instinct of gaining time. “Can you be sure it is the same ship?”’

  “She is a snow, sir, a two-master, Liverpool made. And there is the name on her, and the figurehead.”

  “But how could she have got up so far, away from the water?”’ He felt again the need to compose himself, the need for time. He was aware of the captain’s eyes resting steadily on him. “Perhaps you will tell me she crawled,” he said.

  “The land keeps low on that piece of coast, it does not rise more than a few feet, and it is soft, sir, sand and shingle and mud. The Atlantic tides come in very strong. But perhaps you know those parts?”’

  “No, not at all”

  “The sea makes roads into the land and they run deep sometimes, I have known of four-and five-fathom depth. Behind the shore it is a maze of mud flats and streams and lagoons and they are changing all the time, silting up into swamp, changing their courses, running into creeks that go for miles. That coast never looks the same from one year to the next, and I know it better than most. Your father’s ship lies in a channel that is narrowed now and half choked up, but it could have held deep water twelve years ago, deep enough to tow a ship, taking her at full tide and hauling from the banks.”

  “But the men who did that, who laboured to do it, must have been desperate to hide her from sight of the sea.”

  “Aye, that is what it looks like. And they succeeded in it—she would not have been found now, but for the accident of the men getting drunk. A hundred ships could water there without knowing anything of her. Men go to shoot pig in the scrub or fowl at the edges of the lagoons, but no one goes into the swamps behind. Why should they?”’

  “And the captain?”’ Erasmus spoke with a strange constraint. It was as if he wanted the other to supply him with judgement. “Surely he could not …”

  “Thurso was not a man to abandon his own ship, not
willingly. But this is speculation—I was concerned only to tell you what I could vouch for.” He set down his glass and rose to his feet. “I saw the vessel with my own eyes,” he said. He moved towards the door, then stopped and looked back at Erasmus, who had also risen now. “It is all I know for definite,” he said. “But I sail in those waters regular, now that Florida has been given to us by the Spaniards, and I have heard stories. I did not pay much heed to them before..

  .”

  “What stories?”’

  “The Indians who trade with Cuba from the Florida Keys tell of a kind of settlement somewhere back behind the coast, where white and black live together and no one is chief ‘But twelve years,” Erasmus said. “How could men remain hidden there?”’

  “It is feasible,” Philips said after a moment of reflection. “The southern part of Florida is a wilderness. It is trackless and empty of human kind, save for some scattered Indians. The Spanish never went down so far, not that I know of.

  There was no reason why they should. For seven of these last twelve years they have been fighting a war to keep the colonies that really matter to them. A remote part of the Florida peninsula was of interest to no one. Yes, it is feasible.”

  Erasmus was silent and the captain, perhaps taking the silence for disbelief—he was a prideful man and sensitive in his own way—held out his hand rather abruptly. “I did not say I believed the stories,” he said. ‘With Indians you do not know if they are speaking of today or yesterday or a hundred years ago. Well, I have done what I came to do. Now I must take my leave of you.”

  “One moment.” Erasmus appeared to rouse himself from some private musing. “I am extremely obliged to you for this intelligence you have brought me. Be good enough to let me know where you are lodging, so I may send you a mark of my gratitude.”

  “So much is not necessary.”

  “I do not imply that it is necessary.” Erasmus practised his smile again. He had formed no conscious intention other than to send a sum of money.

  It was right that a man should be rewarded for his trouble, and there was not a sufficient sum in the house. But he knew even now that the money was merely a pretext: he had to know where Philips could be found. “I would esteem it a favour,” he said.

  Pressed thus, the captain complied. He was staying at the Bull in Southwark. He took his leave and Erasmus found himself alone again with the tattered black book on the desk before him. The interview had made him late: there was no time now for more than a cursory look. Philips had been right, the log was largely indecipherable. Mould had attacked the covers and outer pages, obliterating the names of captain and ship. Everywhere damp had spread the ink, running the lines together into blurred webs. The quality of the hand did not help: it was crabbed and uneven, the writing of a man not at ease with a pen.

  But occasionally, and particularly in the latter part, there were entries that could still be made out, dates, details of weather and navigation. His eye caught a name: Haines, set in irons for some offence not named..

  .

  He had no time now for more. When he left the house the log went with him, but it was not until late in the afternoon that he was able to look at it again. All through the day’s business he had found himself recalling, half incredulously, fragments of his interview with the captain, dwelling on details of his visitor’s words and manner as if to detect some falsity in them that would discredit his story, dispel this monstrous notion that men had deliberately abandoned his father’s ship.

  He was alone now in his office. In the larger room adjoining, the clerks still laboured at their long counter, heads studiously lowered—he could see the line of heads and backs if he chose to, through the spyhole set in his door. The offices were at the rear of the building, looking towards the quiet courts south of Still Paul’s. The din of the streets was muted here. The evening had darkened early and he had lit the lamp on his desk. Behind him a fire burned in the grate with a faint, persistent whispering.

  He took the logbook from his drawer and began to look through it again. He saw an entry for November 1752, again with a name—it was names he paused at:

  … bartered with a frenchman for 4. anchs of brandy. Bought 13 cwt rice of Tucker’s people. They brought a man slave aboard, but it being late … promised to bring him off betimes in the morning …

  A musty odour came to him from the softened, slightly swollen pages. Misfortune was apparent even through the bare entries that had survived: No slant of wind any way, he read. Buried a woman of a fever which destroyed her in 5 days. There are now 67 lost and still in the…

  It was near the end of the log, on a page largely effaced, that he found what all this while he had been looking for

  : … sea breeze came in but soon overpowered by a smart tornado obliging us to furl all and come to anchor in 25 fathoms… Following morning when hatches raised found 4 slaves dead in their irons. My cnslletter tells me jettison the sick. The men are muttering against me, they are given countenance by Paris who sets himself… sorry now I gave passage to…

  The name that followed was illegible. Erasmus read through the entry again with utmost care. When he looked up it was with a feeling of gratitude he did not yet understand, though it was fierce enough to contort his face. His cousin had been there then, still alive at the end—for the log was finished now, only a page remained, and that quite illegible. Paris had played a part in what had happened to the ship…

  The abbreviation puzzled him somewhat. He could not understand who might have given Thurso this advice— there was no doubt now that this was Thurso’s log. Perhaps the first mate.

  His mind went back to a day at the shipyard when he had seen them come round together, passing through the shadows of the ship’s bows, out again into the sun, the heavy, deliberate captain and the sharp-faced mate.

  Barton, his name. He had lifted his head and sniffed at the breeze like a dog…

  His thoughts reverted to his cousin, settled on him slowly and with curious care, as though aiming. The clumsy, laughing boy with the sleeves too short who had lifted him away from his failure on the beach, thereby becoming a mortal enemy; the studious youth of his mother’s recommendations; the pale man with the lined face and the hedge-parson’s hat and the shadow of misfortune and disgrace upon him… He was unable to imagine how his cousin might look now; but he knew him in that moment for a leader of mutiny, a man with blood on his hands.

  It must be so, if Philips was to be believed: they must have murdered the captain. They had hauled the ship out of sight of the land, hacked down her masts.

  They could never have intended to return. Return to what? They had taken the negroes off her. That was theft—they had appropriated the ship’s cargo and carried it to shore. So there was piracy to add to the other counts. White men and black men living together with no chief. Not only Thurso’s blood. My father, waiting for his ship to come home, scanning the maps.

  ..

  Afterwards it came to seem to him that the intention had been formed then, with the quiet sound of the fire behind him and the faint rattle of traffic coming through from Cheapside. But it was not until some days later that he knew beyond question that he had to go, had to see—and not just the wreck. He knew it by the desolation that swept through him at the thought that Philips might have left already, might be out of his reach.

  Until this fear was allayed he could not rest. He had sent Hudson in the coach with twenty-five guineas and a note of thanks. And it was Hudson who accompanied him now and waited below while Erasmus spoke to the captain about the two men who had come upon the ship. were either of these still with him? It seemed that one, the ringleader in the business, had been too much of a troublemaker and Philips had handed him over to the harsher discipline of a naval frigate at Savannah. But the other, a man named Harvey, had signed on again and could be found.

  An altogether steadier man, this, a good seaman, he had been led astray on this occasion by rum and the foolish hope of catching on
e of the women…

  “They are simple men, sir,” the captain said. He was not best pleased to learn that Erasmus was proposing to take Harvey away from him, a reliable fore-the-mast man being not so easy to replace. But he was conscious that he had himself been treated with generosity; not to comply would have been ungrateful, even had he felt inclined to go counter to the other’s will, which he did not. Kemp was a man who wielded influence, one whom it was unwise to cross. But it was more than that: there was a quality of suppressed passion in him which Philips—strong-willed enough himself, and used to intractable men—found daunting.

  So Harvey was found and brought to the Kemp house.

  He was blond and ruddy with a usual expression of cheerful competence, though this was overlaid now at finding himself in such surroundings.

  “Now,” Erasmus said to him, “how old are you, Harvey?”’

  The seaman was of those whom nervousness makes more confiding. “I am twenty-nine or I am thirty, sir, depending on how you looks at it. I never knowed my father, my mother gave me up to the parish when I was little, an’ sometimes they told me one thing, sometimes they told me another.”

  ‘So then, let us say you are thirty. You have your health and strength now, but few seafaring men get much beyond forty with those possessions still, certainly not on ships plying to the tropics. You know this yourself, you have not the look of a fool. Even if you last so long, what would there be for you on leaving the sea but rags and beggary? If you will agree to conduct me to this place where you came upon the remains of my father’s ship..

  . I suppose you would be able to find it again?”’

  “Yes, sir, I could find it.”

  “If you will take me there and show me the place, I swear you will not be sorry. You need never return to the sea if you do not wish to. I will take you into my service on good terms, or if you would rather, I will give you a sum that will set you up in some business ashore. I am a rich man and what I say I will do I will do— anyone who knows me will tell you that. I am asking you for a year of your life and offering to free you from want for the rest of it. Come, what do you say?”’